THE counter-revolutionary alliance between US imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy emerged into the light of day last Saturday with the joint framework agreement between the leadership of Russia and America to disarm Syria, which paves the way for the removal of the Assad government and opens the doors for Iran to face the same treatment.
The deal was unveiled at a press conference described by Russian news as being ‘rather jovial in nature, contrasting sharply with the public barbs which have been traded between Russian and US officials in recent days’.
At one point, US Secretary of State, John Kerry, even joked that his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, ‘could be a senator’.
The deal struck between them, however, is no joke for the people of Syria or Iran.
The framework agreement insists that Syria produce, within one week, a complete inventory of its alleged chemical weapons stockpile, with complete destruction to take place by the middle of 2014.
Kerry insisted that one week, despite being a fantastically short time, was all that the Syrian government was going to be allowed.
UN-appointed ‘inspectors’ would be sent in to turn the country upside down with any perceived failure to comply with the draconian regime imposed by this deal being met with serious ‘consequences’.
According to Lavrov, such a failure would lead to a UN resolution with force only to be used against Syria as a ‘last resort’.
While the Stalinists talked about force as a last resort, Obama made it clear that US imperialism ‘reserved the right’ to launch a military attack without UN agreement.
This deal was greeted with expressions of ‘satisfaction’ by the Chinese Stalinist leadership along with the governments of France, Britain and the UN general secretary.
The Stalinist bureaucracy is playing a treacherous role in forging an alliance with US imperialism to disarm the Assad government and bring about regime change.
The cat was let out of the bag on Friday by the UN general secretary, Ban Ki-moon.
Addressing a Women’s International Forum, Moon stated categorically that Assad had ‘committed many crimes against humanity’, adding, ‘Therefore, I’m sure that there will be surely the process of accountability when everything is over.’
No equivocation here; whatever the Syrian government does to comply with this deal, Assad and the leadership of Syria are heading for the criminal court at The Hague to face what passes for imperialist ‘justice’.
Having rescued Obama from a disastrous defeat in Washington over his war plans, Putin has signed up to a plan to effect regime change, disarm Syria and at a stroke remove any threat to the one entity in the region that certainly does possess weapons of mass destruction – the Zionist state of Israel.
The hope held out by Obama is that if the US can destroy the Assad government, it will leave Syria’s main ally, Iran, isolated and pave the way for a similar regime of UN inspections which will be used to manufacture ‘failure to comply’ incidents and provide the pretext for military strikes and invasion.
This entire agreement is nothing more than a treacherous alliance between Stalinism and imperialism to carve up the region and make it safe for imperialist exploitation.
The only force that has already demonstrated that it is capable of stopping imperialist slaughter is the working class.
The resistance of the working class in America and Britain to war against the Syrian people created a huge crisis for imperialism’s leaders. In their weakness, they were forced to rely on the Stalinists to bail them out.
The burning issue of the day is for the working class to put an end to imperialism once and for all through the world socialist revolution and the political revolution in Russia and China to throw out the Stalinist bureaucracies.
This requires the building of revolutionary parties of the Fourth International in every country.